Turkish president slams Greece for its hostile approach to migrants

Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday criticised Greece over its hostile approach toward migrants.

“The attitude of our western neighbor Greece toward migrants has now reached the level of brutality,” Erdogan said in his address to the inaugural congress of the Conference of Constitutional Jurisdictions of the Islamic World in Istanbul.

Unfortunately, the Western countries are not responding to “this brutality of Greece,” the Turkish leader lamented.

“We are all deeply saddened by the indifference to the heart-wrenching images from the borderline and the refugee shelters resembling Nazi camps,” he said.

A similar approach is also witnessed in the fight against the terrorists by hiding behind the phrase of a “political asylum seeker” to host terrorists, he added.

Blaming the West for not being sensitive enough about the issue, Erdogan said the Western countries and some institutions who close their doors to migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Africa show “high levels of tolerance to the terrorist groups PKK and FETO.”

The separatist terror group PKK is indeed financing its attacks on Syria, Iraq and Turkiye by receiving and collecting donations from those countries every year, he further said.

Additionally, speaking on the Syrian crisis that he said claimed the lives of more than 1 million Syrians, Erdogan remarked: “Unfortunately, humanity did not give a good test in the face of this crisis.”

READ: Migrants reveal push back, mistreatment by Greece

Western countries and institutions raised their voices on “the human tragedy in Syria, only when refugees knock on their doors,” he said.

Instead of finding a solution to the crisis, their reaction was manifested as closing the migrants behind barbed wire fences, the president said.

When it comes to their own prosperity, safety and security, those who ignore the oppressed outside their borders, display the “most primitive examples of fascism,” Erdogan argued.

In its more than 35-year terror campaign against Turkiye, the PKK – listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkiye, the US and the EU – has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people, including women, children and infants.

The Fetullah Terrorist Organisation (FETO) orchestrated the July 15, 2016 defeated coup in Turkiye, where 251 people were killed and 2,734 were injured.

Ankara accuses FETO of being behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary.